The internet is a powerful tool for marketers to reach out to a large audience. The internet provides powerful targeted content provision methods such as contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, psychographic targeting, demographic targeting, geographic targeting and the like. Targeted content provision methods enable marketers to reach out to the relevant audience and thus improve their conversion rates, while keeping marketing costs in check.
Geographic targeting, also called geo-targeting or geo-marketing is the method of determining the geographic location (the physical location) of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code. The geographic location of the website visitor may be derived using information such as Internet Protocol (IP) address, Internet Service Provider (ISP), traceroute, and the like. Such information may be derived from click stream data, cookies, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request headers, server traffic logs.
However, such methods to determine the geographic location may be complex, computing intensive and often inaccurate. IP addresses are constantly being assigned, allocated, reallocated, moved and changed due to changes in internet infrastructure, users having IP addresses dynamically assigned or users moving from one network to another, and so forth. In order to keep up with these changes IP spidering and finely tuned delivery mechanisms may be employed. IP spidering includes complex algorithms, bandwidth measurement and mapping technology to periodically identify IP address changes.
Further, marketers may desire to exchange information about customers that they have in common. This may help the marketers to augment their knowledge of their customers and thus improve geographic targeting. However, the information about customers, specifically Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the customers, held by marketers may often be confidential. PII includes any information which uniquely identifies the customer, such as the customer's e-mail address, social security number (SSN), mobile phone number, customer's name, mailing address, date of birth, and the like. The customer's PII may be subject to privacy regulations, or the marketer may have a contractual obligation not to disclose its customers' PII. Further, marketers may decide not to share their customers' PII with other entities due to business considerations irrespective of regulations or contractual obligations. For example, the marketer may want to be viewed as an organization that maintains a high level of customer privacy.